of what he frantically calls 'a sickness which I cannot name or
describe,' and ends his letter: 'I profess to you truly, that my
loathness to give over now, seems to myself an ill sign that I shall
write no more.' It was at this time that he wrote the _Biathanatos_,
with its explicit declaration in the preface: 'Whensoever any
affliction assails me, methinks I have the keys of my prison in mine own
hand, and no remedy presents itself so soon to my heart as mine own
sword.' Fifteen years later, when one of his most serious illnesses was
upon him, and his life in real danger, he notes down all his symptoms as
he lies awake night after night, with an extraordinary and, in itself,
morbid acuteness. 'I observe the physician with the same diligence as he
the disease; I see he fears, and I fear with him; I overtake him, I
over-run him in his fear, because he makes his pace slow; I fear the
more because he disguises his fear, and I see it with the more sharpness
because he would not have me see it.' As he lies in bed, he realises 'I
am mine own ghost, and rather affright my beholders than instruct them.
They conceive the worst of me now, and yet fear worse; they give me for
dead now, and yet wonder how I do when they wake at midnight, and ask
how I do to-morrow. Miserable and inhuman posture, where I must practise
my lying in the grave by lying still.' This preying upon itself of the
brain is but one significant indication of a temperament, neurotic
enough indeed, but in which the neurosis is still that of the curious
observer, the intellectual casuist, rather than of the artist. A
wonderful piece of self-analysis, worthy of St. Augustine, which occurs
in one of his funeral sermons, gives poignant expression to what must
doubtless have been a common condition of so sensitive a brain. 'I throw
myself down in my chamber, and I call in and invite God and His angels
together; and when they are there, I neglect God and his angels for the
noise of a fly, for the rattling of a coach, for the whining of a door;
I talk on in the same posture of prayer, eyes lifted up, knees bowed
down, as though I prayed to God; and if God should ask me when I last
thought of God in that prayer, I cannot tell. Sometimes I find that I
forgot what I was about; But when I began to forget it, I cannot tell. A
memory of yesterday's pleasures, a fear of to-morrow's dangers, a straw
under my knee, a noise in mine ear, a chimera in my brain, troubles me
in my prayer.' It is this brain, turned inward upon itself, and darting
out on every side in purely random excursions, that was responsible, I
cannot doubt, for all the contradictions of a career in which the inner
logic is not at first apparent.
Donne's career divides itself sharply into three parts: his youth, when
we see him a soldier, a traveller, a lover, a poet, unrestrained in all
the passionate adventures of youth; then a middle period, in which he is
a lawyer and a theologian, seeking knowledge and worldly advancement,
without any too restraining scruple as to the means which come to his
hand; and then a last stage of saintly living and dying. What then is
the link between these successive periods, the principle of development,
the real Donne in short? 'He was none of these, or all of these, or
more,' says Mr. Gosse. But, surely, he was indeed all of these, and his
individuality precisely the growth from one stage to another, the subtle
intelligence being always there, working vividly, but in each period
working in a different direction. 'I would fain do something, but that I
cannot tell what is no wonder.' Everything in Donne seems to me to
explain itself in that fundamental uncertainty of aim, and his
uncertainty of aim partly by a morbid physical condition. He searches,
nothing satisfies him, tries everything, in vain; finding satisfaction
at last in the Church, as in a haven of rest. Always it is the curious,
insatiable brain searching. And he is always wretchedly aware that he
'can do nothing constantly.'
His three periods, then, are three stages in the search after a way to
walk in, something worthy of himself to do. Thus, of his one printed
collection of verse he writes: 'Of my _Anniversaries_, the fault which I
acknowledge in myself is to have descended to print anything in verse,
which, though it have excuse, even in our times, by example of men,
which one would think should as little have done it as I, yet I confess
I wonder how I declined to it, and do not pardon myself.' Of his legal
studies he writes in the same letter: 'For my purpose of proceeding in
the profession of the law, so far as to a title, you may be pleased to
correct that imagination where you find it. I ever thought the study of
it my best entertainment and pastime, but I have no ambition nor design
upon the style.' Until he accepts religion, with all its limitations and
encouragements, he has not even sure landmarks on his way. So
speculative a brain, able to prove, and proving for its own uneasy
satisfaction, that even suicide is 'not so naturally sin, that it may
never be otherwise,' could allow itself to be guided by no fixed rules;
and to a brain so abstract, conduct must always have seemed of less
importance than it does to most other people, and especially conduct
which is argument, like the demonstrations on behalf of what seems, on
the face of it, a somewhat iniquitous divorce and re-marriage, or like
those unmeasured eulogies, both of this 'blest pair of swans,' and of
the dead child of a rich father. He admits, in one of his letters, that
in his elegies, 'I did best when I had least truth for my subjects'; and
of the _Anniversaries_ in honour of little Mistress Drury, 'But for the
other part of the imputation of having said so much, my defence is, that
my purpose was to say as well as I could; for since I never saw the
gentlewoman, I cannot be understood to have bound myself to have spoken
the just truth.' He is always the casuist, always mentally impartial in
the face of a moral problem, reserving judgment on matters which, after
all, seem to him remote from an unimpassioned contemplation of things;
until that moment of crisis comes, long after he has become a clergyman,
when the death of his wife changed the world for him, and he became, in
the words of Walton, 'crucified to the world, and all those vanities,
those imaginary pleasures, that are daily acted on that restless stage;
and they were as perfectly crucified to him.' From that time to the end
of his life he had found what he had all the while been seeking: rest
for the restlessness of his mind, in a meditation upon the divine
nature; occupation, in being 'ambassador of God,' through the pulpit;
himself, as it seemed to him, at his fullest and noblest. It was
himself, really, that he had been seeking all the time, conscious at
least of that in all the deviations of the way; himself, the ultimate of
his curiosities.
II
And yet, what remains to us out of this life of many purposes, which had
found an end satisfying to itself in the Deanery of St. Paul's, is
simply a bundle of manuscript verses, which the writer could bring
himself neither to print nor to destroy. His first satire speaks
contemptuously of 'giddy fantastic poets,' and, when he allowed himself
to write poetry, he was resolved to do something different from what
anybody had ever done before, not so much from the artist's instinctive
desire of originality, as from a kind of haughty, yet really bourgeois,
desire to be indebted to nobody. With what care he wrote is confessed in
a passage of one of his letters, where, speaking of a sermon, he says:
'For, as Cardinal Cusanus wrote a book, _Cribratio Alchorani_, I have
cribrated, and re-cribrated, and post-cribrated the sermon, and must
necessarily say, the King, who hath let fall his eye upon some of my
poems, never saw, of mine, a hand, or an eye, or an affection, set down
with so much study and diligence, and labour of syllables, as in this
sermon I expressed those two points.' But he thought there were other
things more important than being a poet, and this very labour of his was
partly a sign of it. 'He began,' says Mr. Gosse with truth, 'as if
poetry had never been written before.' To the people of his time, to
those who came immediately after him, he was the restorer of English
poetry.
The Muses' garden, with pedantic weeds
O'erspread, was purged by thee,
says Carew, in those memorial verses in which the famous lines occur:
Here lies a king that ruled as he thought fit
The universal monarchy of wit.
Shakespeare was living, remember, and it was Elizabethan poetry that
Donne set himself to correct. He began with metre, and invented a system
of prosody which has many merits, and would have had more in less
arbitrary hands. 'Donne, for not keeping of accent, deserved hanging,'
said Ben Jonson, who was nevertheless his friend and admirer. And yet,
if one will but read him always for the sense, for the natural emphasis
of what he has to say, there are few lines which will not come out in at
all events the way that he meant them to be delivered. The way he meant
them to be delivered is not always as beautiful as it is expressive.
Donne would be original at all costs, preferring himself to his art. He
treated poetry as Æsop's master treated his slave, and broke what he
could not bend.
But Donne's novelty of metre is only a part of his too deliberate
novelty as a poet. As Mr. Gosse has pointed out, with a self-evident
truth which has apparently waited for him to say it, Donne's real
position in regard to the poetry of his time was that of a realistic
writer, who makes a clean sweep of tradition, and puts everything down
in the most modern words and with the help of the most trivial actual
images.
To what a cumbersome unwieldiness,
And burdensome corpulence my love hath grown,
he will begin a poem on _Love's Diet_. Of love, as the master of hearts,
he declares seriously:
He swallows us and never chaws;
By him, as by chain'd shot, whole ranks do die;
He is the tyrant pike, our hearts the fry.
And, in his unwise insistence that every metaphor shall be absolutely
new, he drags medical and alchemical and legal properties into verse
really full of personal passion, producing at times poetry which is a
kind of disease of the intellect, a sick offshoot of science. Like most
poets of powerful individuality, Donne lost precisely where he gained.
That cumulative and crowding and sweeping intellect which builds up his
greatest poems into miniature Escurials of poetry, mountainous and
four-square to all the winds of the world, 'purges' too often the
flowers as well as the weeds out of 'the Muses' garden.' To write poetry
as if it had never been written before is to attempt what the greatest
poets never attempted. There are only two poets in English literature
who thus stand out of the tradition, who are without ancestors, Donne
and Browning. Each seems to have certain qualities almost greater than
the qualities of the greatest; and yet in each some precipitation of
arrogant egoism remains in the crucible, in which the draught has all
but run immortally clear.
Donne's quality of passion is unique in English poetry. It is a rapture
in which the mind is supreme, a reasonable rapture, and yet carried to a
pitch of actual violence. The words themselves rarely count for much, as
they do in Crashaw, for instance, where words turn giddy at the height
of their ascension. The words mean things, and it is the things that
matter. They can be brutal: 'For God's sake, hold your tongue, and let
me love!' as if a long, pre-supposed self-repression gave way suddenly,
in an outburst. 'Love, any devil else but you,' he begins, in his abrupt
leap to the heart of the matter. Or else his exaltation will be grave,
tranquil, measureless in assurance.
All kings, and all their favourites,
All glory of honours, beauties, wits,
The sun itself, which makes time, as they pass,
Is elder by a year now than it was
When thou and I first one another saw.
All other things to their destruction draw,
Only our love hath no decay;
This no to-morrow hath, no yesterday;
Running, it never runs from us away,
But truly keeps his first, last, everlasting day.
This lover loves with his whole nature, and so collectedly because
reason, in him, is not in conflict with passion, but passion's ally. His
senses speak with unparalleled directness, as in those elegies which
must remain the model in English of masculine sensual sobriety. He
distinguishes the true end of such loving in a forcible,
characteristically prosaic image:
Whoever loves, if he do not propose
The right true end of love, he's one that goes
To sea for nothing but to make him sick.
And he exemplifies every motion and the whole pilgrim's progress of
physical love, with a deliberate, triumphant, unluxurious explicitness
which 'leaves no doubt,' as we say 'of his intentions,' and can be no
more than referred to passingly in modern pages. In a series of hate
poems, of which I will quote the finest, he gives expression to a whole
region of profound human sentiment which has never been expressed, out
of Catullus, with such intolerable truth.
When by thy scorn, O murderess, I am dead,
And that thou think'st thee free
From all solicitation from me,
Then shall my ghost come to thy bed,
And thee, feign'd vestal, in worse arms shall see:
Then thy sick taper will begin to wink,
And he, whose thou art then, being tired before,
Will, if thou stir, or pinch to wake him, think
Thou call'st for more,
And, in false sleep, will from thee shrink;
And then, poor aspen wretch, neglected thou
Bathed in a cold quicksilver sweat wilt lie
A verier ghost than I.
What I will say, I will not tell thee now,
Lest that preserve thee; and since my love is spent,
I'd rather thou should'st painfully repent,
Than by my threatenings rest still innocent.
Yet it is the same lover, and very evidently the same, who winnows all
this earthly passion to a fine, fruitful dust, fit to make bread for
angels. Ecstatic reason, passion justifying its intoxication by
revealing the mysteries that it has come thus to apprehend, speak in the
quintessence of Donne's verse with an exalted simplicity which seems to
make a new language for love. It is the simplicity of a perfectly
abstract geometrical problem, solved by one to whom the rapture of
solution is the blossoming of pure reason. Read the poem called _The
Ecstasy_, which seems to anticipate a metaphysical Blake; it is all
close reasoning, step by step, and yet is what its title claims for it.
It may be, though I doubt it, that other poets who have written personal
verse in English, have known as much of women's hearts and the senses of
men, and the interchanges of passionate intercourse between man and
woman; but, partly by reason of this very method of saying things, no
one has ever rendered so exactly, and with such elaborate subtlety,
every mood of the actual passion. It has been done in prose; may one not
think of Stendhal, for a certain way he has of turning the whole forces
of the mind upon those emotions and sensations which are mostly left to
the heat of an unreflective excitement? Donne, as he suffers all the
colds and fevers of love, is as much the sufferer and the physician of
his disease as we have seen him to be in cases of actual physical
sickness. Always detached from himself, even when he is most helplessly
the slave of circumstances, he has that frightful faculty of seeing
through his own illusions; of having no illusions to the mind, only to
the senses. Other poets, with more wisdom towards poetry, give us the
beautiful or pathetic results of no matter what creeping or soaring
passions. Donne, making a new thing certainly, if not always a thing of
beauty, tells us exactly what a man really feels as he makes love to a
woman, as he sits beside her husband at table, as he dreams of her in
absence, as he scorns himself for loving her, as he hates or despises
her for loving him, as he realises all that is stupid in her devotion,
and all that is animal in his. 'Nature's lay idiot, I taught thee to
love,' he tells her, in a burst of angry contempt, priding himself on
his superior craft in the art. And his devotions to her are exquisite,
appealing to what is most responsive in woman, beyond those of tenderer
poets. A woman cares most for the lover who understands her best, and is
least taken in by what it is the method of her tradition to feign. So
wearily conscious that she is not the abstract angel of her pretence and
of her adorers, she will go far in sheer thankfulness to the man who can
see so straight into her heart as to have
found something like a heart,
But colours it and corners had;
It was not good, it was not bad,
It was entire to none, and few had part.
Donne shows women themselves, in delight, anger, or despair; they know
that he finds nothing in the world more interesting, and they much more
than forgive him for all the ill he says of them. If women most
conscious of their sex were ever to read Donne, they would say, He was a
great lover; he understood.
And, in the poems of divine love, there is the same quality of mental
emotion as in the poems of human love. Donne adores God reasonably,
knowing why he adores Him. He renders thanks point by point, celebrates
the heavenly perfections with metaphysical precision, and is no vaguer
with God than with woman. Donne knew what he believed and why he
believed, and is carried into no heat or mist as he tells over the
recording rosary of his devotions. His _Holy Sonnets_ are a kind of
argument with God; they tell over, and discuss, and resolve, such
perplexities of faith and reason as would really occur to a speculative
brain like his. Thought crowds in upon thought, in these tightly packed
lines, which but rarely admit a splendour of this kind:
At the round earth's imagined corners blow
Your trumpets, angels, and arise, arise
From death, you numberless infinities
Of souls, and to your scattered bodies go.
More typical is this too knotted beginning of another sonnet:
Batter my heart, three-person'd God; for you
As yet but knock; breathe, shine, and seek to mend;
That I may rise, and stand, o'erthrow me, and bend
Your force, to break, blow, burn, and make me new.
Having something very minute and very exact to say, he hates to leave
anything out; dreading diffuseness, as he dreads the tame sweetness of
an easy melody, he will use only the smallest possible number of words
to render his thought; and so, as here, he is too often ingenious rather
than felicitous, forgetting that to the poet poetry comes first, and all
the rest afterwards.
For the writing of great poetry something more is needed than to be a
poet and to have great occasions. Donne was a poet, and he had the
passions and the passionate adventures, in body and mind, which make the
material for poetry; he was sincere to himself in expressing what he
really felt under the burden of strong emotion and sharp sensation.
Almost every poem that he wrote is written on a genuine inspiration, a
genuine personal inspiration, but most of his poems seem to have been
written before that personal inspiration has had time to fuse itself
with the poetic inspiration. It is always useful to remember
Wordsworth's phrase of 'emotion recollected in tranquillity,' for
nothing so well defines that moment of crystallisation in which direct
emotion or sensation deviates exquisitely into art. Donne is intent on
the passion itself, the thought, the reality; so intent that he is not
at the same time, in that half-unconscious way which is the way of the
really great poet, equally intent on the form, that both may come to
ripeness together. Again it is the heresy of the realist. Just as he
drags into his verse words that have had no time to take colour from
men's association of them with beauty, so he puts his 'naked thinking
heart' into verse as if he were setting forth an argument. He gives us
the real thing, as he would have been proud to assure us. But poetry
will have nothing to do with real things, until it has translated them
into a diviner world. That world may be as closely the pattern of ours
as the worlds which Dante saw in hell and purgatory; the language of the
poet may be as close to the language of daily speech as the supreme
poetic language of Dante. But the personal or human reality and the
imaginative or divine reality must be perfectly interfused, or the art
will be at fault. Donne is too proud to abandon himself to his own
inspiration, to his inspiration as a poet; he would be something more
than a voice for deeper yet speechless powers; he would make poetry
speak straight. Well, poetry will not speak straight, in the way Donne
wished it to, and under the goading that his restless intellect gave it.
He forgot beauty, preferring to it every form of truth, and beauty has
revenged itself upon him, glittering miraculously out of many lines in
which he wrote humbly, and leaving the darkness of a retreating shadow
upon great spaces in which a confident intellect was conscious of
shining.
For, though mind be the heaven, where love may sit,
Beauty a convenient type may be to figure it,
he writes, in the _Valediction to his Book_, thus giving formal
expression to his heresy. 'The greatest wit, though not the best poet of
our nation,' Dryden called him; the greatest intellect, that is, which
had expressed itself in poetry. Dryden himself was not always careful to
distinguish between what material was fit and what unfit for verse; so
that we can now enjoy his masterly prose with more equable pleasure than
his verse. But he saw clearly enough the distinction in Donne between
intellect and the poetical spirit; that fatal division of two forces,
which, had they pulled together instead of apart, might have achieved a
result wholly splendid. Without a great intellect no man was ever a
great poet; but to possess a great intellect is not even a first step in
the direction of becoming a poet at all.
Compare Donne, for instance, with Herrick. Herrick has little enough of
the intellect, the passion, the weight and the magnificence of Donne;
but, setting out with so much less to carry, he certainly gets first to
the goal, and partly by running always in the right direction. The most
limited poet in the language, he is the surest. He knows the airs that
weave themselves into songs, as he knows the flowers that twine best
into garlands. Words come to him in an order which no one will ever
alter, and no one will ever forget. Whether they come easily or not is
no matter; he knows when they have come right, and they always come
right before he lets them go. But Donne is only occasionally sure of his
words as airs; he sets them doggedly to the work of saying something,
whether or no they step to the beat of the music. Conscious writer
though he was, I suppose he was more or less unconscious of his
extraordinary felicities, more conscious probably of how they came than
of what they were doing. And they come chiefly through a sudden
heightening of mood, which brings with it a clearer and a more exalted
mode of speech, in its merely accurate expression of itself. Even then I
cannot imagine him quite reconciled to beauty, at least actually doing
homage to it, but rather as one who receives a gift by the way.
1899.
EMILY BRONTË
This was a woman young and passionate,
Loving the Earth, and loving most to be
Where she might be alone with liberty;
Loving the beasts, who are compassionate;
The homeless moors, her home; the bright elate
Winds of the cold dawn; rock and stone and tree;
Night, bringing dreams out of eternity;
And memory of Death's unforgetting date.
She too was unforgetting: has she yet
Forgotten that long agony when her breath
Too fierce for living fanned the flame of death?
Earth for her heather, does she now forget
What pity knew not in her love from scorn,
And that it was an unjust thing to be born?
The Stoic in woman has been seen once only, and that in the only woman
in whom there has been seen the paradox of passion without sensuousness.
Emily Brontë lived with an unparalleled energy a life of outward quiet,
in a loneliness which she shared only with the moors and with the
animals whom she loved. She required no passion-experience to endow her
with more than a memory of passion. Passion was alive in her as flame is
alive in the earth. And the vehemence of that inner fire fed on itself,
and wore out her body before its time, because it had no respite and no
outlet. We see her condemned to self-imprisonment, and dying of too much
life.
Her poems are few and brief, and nothing more personal has ever been
written. A few are as masterly in execution as in conception, and almost
all have a direct truth of utterance, which rarely lacks at least the
bare beauty of muscle and sinew, of a kind of naked strength and
alertness. They are without heat or daylight, the sun is rarely in them,
and then 'blood-red'; light comes as starshine, or comes as
hostile light
That does not warm but burn.